Emmanuel Watkins, who performs under the name Official Dan, is getting set to release his first album next February, while his second lyric video drops next Tuesday.
The 19-year-old dancehall singer, who currently makes a living as a goods’ wholesaler from his shop out of his home in Albouystown, said the video is for the song “Till it gone”, which is a tribute to his high school love.
His album, ‘Young Blood’ will consist of 15 songs and will be publicly available in February, 2023. He said ‘Young Blood’ is the result of encouragement from his teachers who told them: ‘You performing all the time in this school, we know you could sing, look you got artists like Baby Skilla singing and all these artists singing in Guyana and you haven’t released anything’. This made him get serious with dancehall music since he too wanted to become a star.
Official Dan told this reporter that when he was in Form 2 at Charlestown Secondary School he and a friend would compete in writing songs for fun, to see who had the better writing skills. He also followed award shows like BET and VMA which got him into pop and hip-hop music.
When he listened to pop and hip-hop, he said, he was around 13 years old and he began writing it with his friend Latisha. At that time, he used the moniker ‘Younggadis’.
He was in Form 3 when he wrote a song called “School Anthem”, which he performed at school concerts; it was a huge success at the school. That motivated him even more and he created a YouTube account and started to post freestyle music. Some of his nine early songs will appear on the ‘Young Blood’ album, along with new music. Among his songs are: “Murda Coron”, which is about COVID-19 as it disrupted his social life; “WanDan”, which was released when he was 17 years old as a song for the “birds’ men”; and “City Vybz” which was about a club he went to where he had a great experience. He has also done a collaboration with Babyskello called “We Them a Follow”, released in March 2021. Then there is “Gal A Wine”, which he said is a dancing song for the girls. “School Anthem’’, he said, is his most popular song. He said he released it in June 2021 in time for CXC as a form of motivation and later on, performed it for the Charlestown alums in America. “Dawgs Don’t Bark”, is a collaboration with four other artists in a medley, he said, is a war song released in January 2022. The others are “Shell Down Party”, released in April 2022, for the Party Lovers and “Now U Want Me”, released on June 5, 2022. That last song, he said, he had initially introduced on TikTok, “after I saw the girls styling me about my slippers and bicycle”. It eventually went viral with over 100,000 views and then he wrote the song and performed it at the ‘Skeng Badderation’ concert in May, and released the music video in June.
Official Dan said that he usually records music straight out of the IQ Studios and Bobby Kush at the moment.
When asked about encouraging words for youths, he said: “Know what you want, and go for it because only you know what you want.”
Official Dan took the opportunity to thank his freelance public relations officer Esan Paul, who is with IQ Studio. His music can be found on YouTube: https://youtube.com/channel/UCjyd3A1Eq, Facebook: Official Dan-G1-, and TikTok:
https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMFrmfWxp/. (Subhana Shiwmangal)
